Our Paease is really full of incredible places and from Milan you can reach places that do not even seem real. Where it doesn’ t even feel like you are in Italy. We hustle so much to travel to the other side of the world, but we don’t know that behind home we have extraordinary hidden treasures that we may not know about. Like this island about an hour from Milan, small and overgrown, where only one inhabitant lives. In the middle of a lake, among the best known in Italy and the world.
A lake, an exclusive destination for many people every year, a wedding location, home to elegant villas and hotels among the best in the world. A place that everyone envies us and that we have very close to home. Lake Como, that’s right. You guessed it.
Right in the middle of the Lario is this virtually uninhabited island with no buildings except a few recently built villas and an old Baroque church. It is the only island on the Lake.
The island with only one inhabitant near Milan
If you did not know it, here is the name revealed, we are talking about Comacina Island, belonging to the municipality of Tremezzina. An earthly paradise most of the time inaccessible to the public and therefore unspoiled and still with very few human traces. If we think about how busy the surroundings between Como, Bellagio and the other beaten locations are, especially in summer.
The history of the island is very ancient and if you are interested we leave you the link to discover it in detail. Let us just tell you that it is a small island of glacial origin whose traces in history seem to date back to the very distant year 1000, 11th century or so.
Think what this place has not seen, the transformations it has undergone. If it could talk, the stories it would tell. After a devastation in 1169, it was rediscovered only in 1900. Ceded to the King of Belgium in 1919, he then donated it to the Italian government. It became the property of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts charged with protecting its archaeological interest.
With the intention of making it a residence for artists in 1939 they built 3 cottages there as residences. There was also a hotel and a restaurant. Over time these two closed their doors. Only the cottages and the Late Roman Church remain. Living there seems to be only one person, the janitor, in one of the cottages. Enough. Him, Nature and the lake around.
The island can be visited at certain times. The website has all the information on how to arrange a trip.